Title :
Finding People in Apartments with a Mobile Robot
Author :
Volkhardt, M. ; Gross, H.-M.
Author_Institution :
Neuroinf. & Cognitive Robot. Lab., Ilmenau Univ. of Technol., Ilmenau, Germany
Abstract :
Mobile companion robots for elderly people are subject to recent research efforts. To provide useful services the robot must be aware of the position of the user. Since the field-of-view of the robot is limited, the user can easily leave the robot´s perception, e.g. by going to another room. This paper proposes a method to search and locate a person not in the vicinity of the robot by driving through the apartment and checking for people. We apply restrictive as well as computationally expensive detection methods on-demand to verify the hypotheses of a real time person tracker. Additionally, the search-tour of the robot is guided by an occurrence probability histogram of previous positions of the user. The system has been tested by evaluating accuracy and time the robot needs to find a user in a 3-room scenario.
Keywords :
mobile robots; object tracking; path planning; robot vision; statistical analysis; 3-room scenario; detection methods; elderly people; mobile companion robots; occurrence probability histogram; realtime person tracker; robot field-of-view; robot perception; robot search-tour; user position; Histograms; Legged locomotion; Navigation; Robot sensing systems; Tracking; Search people; companion robot; finding people; home environment; mobile robotics;
Conference_Titel :
Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2013 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Manchester
DOI :
10.1109/SMC.2013.742